1Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, UMR1572 CNRS-CEA-UVSQ, Bât. 701, Orme des Merisiers, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
2Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines, Versailles, France
3Laboratoire de Biogéochimie et Ecologie des Milieux Continentaux, CNRS-UPMC-INRA, Paris, France
Received: 07 Aug 2008 – Published in Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss.: 28 Oct 2008 – Published: 31 Mar 2010
Abstract. An inverse model using atmospheric CO2 observations from a European network of stations to reconstruct daily CO2 fluxes and their uncertainties over Europe at 40 km resolution has been developed within a Bayesian framework. In this first part, a pseudo-data experiment is performed to assess the potential of continuous measurements over Europe using a network of 10 stations of the AEROCARB project such as in 2001 (http://www.aerocarb.cnrs-gif.fr/). Under the assumptions of a small observation noise and a perfect atmospheric transport model, the reconstruction of daily CO2 fluxes and in particular of their synoptic variability is best over Western Europe where the network is the densest. At least a 10 days temporal and a 1000 km spatial averaging of the inverted daily/40 km fluxes is required in order to obtain a good agreement between the estimated and the "true" fluxes in terms of correlation and variability. The performance of the inversion system rapidly degrades when fluxes are sought for a smaller temporal or spatial averaging.
Carouge, C., Bousquet, P., Peylin, P., Rayner, P. J., and Ciais, P.: What can we learn from European continuous atmospheric CO2 measurements to quantify regional fluxes – Part 1: Potential of the 2001 network, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 3107-3117, doi:10.5194/acp-10-3107-2010, 2010.